Blog of AMEG, the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, discussing the situation in the Arctic and the action necessary to avoid catastrophic warming, including the need for geoengineering to be accepted as an indispensable part of a comprehensive plan of action to cool the Arctic and to bring the atmosphere and oceans back to their pre-industrial state.

Friday, December 7, 2012

This strategic plan was prepared by the independent policy group, AMEG (the Arctic Methane Emergency Group), comprising a multidisciplinary team of leading scientific experts, system engineers, communicators and concerned citizens.

Purpose

The purpose of this document is firstly to warn the world of the extreme and imminent danger of global famine and ensuing strife created by rapid Arctic warming and precipitous sea ice retreat, and secondly to provide a strategic plan for handling this situation.

The international community is totally unprepared for the speed of change in the Arctic, the dramatic effects on global climate and the dire repercussions on food production.

The tendency among scientists and the media has been to ignore or understate the seriousness of the situation in the Arctic. AMEG is using best available evidence and best available explanations for the processes at work. These processes include a number of vicious cycles which are growing in power exponentially, involving ocean, atmosphere, sea ice, snow, permafrost and methane. If these cycles are allowed to continue, the end result will be runaway global warming.

The situation is so urgent that, unless appropriate action is taken within a few months, the window of opportunity will be lost. Adaptation to the consequences will be impossible, as famine spreads inexorably to all countries.

The situation is of unprecedented danger in the history of civilisation. Humans are not psychologically prepared to deal with such mortal danger except by suppressing thoughts of it. But we, as a human society, have to “get a grip” if we are to survive.

The good news is that AMEG believes that the emergency situation can be handled, but only if faced squarely and treated with focus, determination and urgency. The international community must not only tackle the effects of a growing number and severity of weather extremes, tantamount to abrupt climate change, but must also tackle the underlying cause: a vicious cycle of Arctic warming and sea ice retreat.

Peoples of the world must be told the truth about the extreme danger that we all face. Then there is a unique opportunity for all nations to pull together to fight the common “enemy”, which is the vicious cycle of Arctic warming and sea ice retreat.

Governments of the world must not pretend that there is no immediate crisis. They must understand the chain reaction of cause and effect, and collaborate to protect all citizens.

Introduction

Abrupt climate change is upon us. Extreme weather events are on the increase. Farmers are in despair. Food prices are rising. The UN climate change policy simply based on emissions reduction cannot deal with the immediate danger. The UN and member governments should have acted years ago to avert the crisis now unfolding. What has been happening in the Arctic has been completely overlooked, and now only drastic action to cool the Arctic has any chance of rescuing humanity.

A key factor is the Arctic sea ice, whose reflection of sunshine keeps the planet cool. Remove the sea ice, and not only does the planet start to overheat, but the whole climate is suddenly changed. The global weather systems, on whose predictability farmers rely, are dependent for their stability on there being a temperature gradient between tropics and the poles. Remove the snow and ice at one pole, and the weather systems go awry and we have “global weirding”. Furthermore, the weather systems get stuck in one place, and we get weather extremes: long spells of hot/dry weather with drought, or long spells of cold/wet weather with floods.

This global weirding has started with a vengeance. The sea ice is rapidly disappearing. The behaviour of the polar jet stream is disrupted. Extreme weather events occur more often and with greater ferocity. And the food price index climbs and climbs.

There is an obvious relationship between strife and food – if you starve a nation they will fight to get food. This relationship has been pinned down by an organisation called the Complex Systems Institute, CSI. They show that the food riots break out when the food price index rises above a certain critical level. An example was the Arab Spring.

Figure 1 ~ A trend line analysis of CSI data

Figure 1 adds trend lines to the CSI data, the Rabobank Report forecast for UN FAO Food Price Index for June 2013 and the potential repeat of 2008 and 2011 at the elevated levels resulting from the overall underlying trend of line 1.

The current index is above the critical level. Because of extreme weather events this year, the index is expected to rise again in 2013. The UN’s food watchdog, the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation), forecast that the index will rise even further in 2014.

Meanwhile the insurance industry is worried by the trend towards greater number and strength of extreme weather events, including hurricanes. Note that Sandy’s cost was greatly amplified by the diversion westward at it approached the coast off New York. Sandy had hit a jet stream blocking pattern. The loss of Arctic sea ice is leading to this kind of unusual event become more frequent. The insurers are worried, but governments should be even more worried, because extreme weather events will drive the food price index even higher.

The critical situation

Figure 2 ~ Connecting the dots and breaking the chain

As the sea ice retreats, exposed water absorbs more sunshine, heating the water and causing further melt of the sea ice in a vicious cycle. This appears to be the dominant positive feedback loop in the Arctic, although snow retreat may contribute nearly as much to the warming of the Arctic generally in a second feedback loop.

A further feedback loop is ominous: as the Arctic warms, the thawing of land and subsea permafrost allows the discharge of growing quantities of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, which in turn causes further warming in a vicious cycle. This cycle is not yet noticeable. However there is over a trillion tons of carbon stored in permafrost in the form of organic material, which is liable to decompose anaerobically to form methane. And the permafrost forms the cap on an even larger carbon store already in the form of methane. Most scientists now accept that Northern Hemisphere land permafrost will thaw entirely this century. There is the potential for the release of enough methane into the atmosphere to cause runaway global warming, with temperatures rising well over ten degrees C.

The most immediate negative impact of these cycles and the resultant rapid warming of the Arctic atmosphere is a disruption of polar jet stream from its normal behaviour, such that there are more frequent and more severe weather extremes experienced in the Northern Hemisphere. This impact has grown so conspicuously over the past few years that we can honestly say that we are now experiencing abrupt climate change. The result of this climate change is widespread crop failure and an ever deepening food crisis.

A measure of the worsening situation is the food price index. This has spikes when the price of oil rises, but the underlying value has been rising steadily since 2006. Today, the index is slightly more than the critical price level above which food riots are liable to break out – an example having been the Arab Spring. Largely as a result of the crop failures this year, the FAO forecast that the index will rise higher in 2013 and higher again in 2014. If the trend in weather extremes continues, then these figures could prove optimistic. With a billion people on the edge of starvation today, we could see 2 billion by this time next year. It will be a humanitarian disaster. Furthermore, social unrest will rise, and economic growth and stability compromised in the developed and developing countries.

However there are longer term impacts and threats of Arctic warming, in particular (i) Greenland Ice Sheet destabilisation, (ii) accelerated methane discharge, (iii) loss of biodiversity and habitat, and (iv) heat absorption making it more difficult to keep to global warming targets.

As the snow and sea ice retreat from their levels in the 70s, more solar energy is absorbed. Taking the 70s as the baseline (zero forcing), this year's retreat produced as much as 0.4 petawatts of climate forcing averaged over the year. Much of this heat energy is retained in the Arctic, causing ice to melt and sea and land temperatures to rise. As temperatures rise, there will be slightly more thermal radiation into space, dissipating some of this energy. However most of this heat energy will slowly dissipate across the planet - and 0.4 petawatts is equivalent to half the forcing producing by anthropogenic CO2 emissions (1.6 watts per square metre). Peter Wadhams has estimated that the sea ice retreat by itself is equivalent to the forcing from 20 years of CO2 emissions, thus making it much more difficult for the global temperature to be kept below the so-called safe limit of 2 degrees warming.

However these long term effects are somewhat academic, if the immediate impact is to raise food prices far above a safe level.

It is much easier to think about and quantify the longer term impacts of Arctic warming than the more immediate impacts. This is a trap for the unwary. Therefore AMEG is trying to bring the world's attention to the immediate impacts, as they turn out to be colossal even this year, and are likely to be worse in 2013 and even worse than that in 2014.

It is clear that abrupt climate change has started, but not in the way we had been told to expect. Yes, there would be more climate extremes as the planet heated, but we were expecting a linear or near linear behaviour of the climate system, with gradual temperature change over the century. Instead we have striking non-linearity, with exponential growth in frequency and severity of climate extremes. This non-linearity is almost certain to have arisen from the exponential decline in sea ice, as shown in the PIOMAS sea ice volume trend. The trend is for September ice to fall to zero by 2015. Thus we can expect one month without sea ice in 2015, with the possibility for this event in 2014 or even in 2013.

Apart from volcanic eruptions and earthquakes with their step changes of state, the behaviour of the sea ice is possibly the most non-linear part of the Earth System because the melting is a threshold process. Until recently it was not well understood how the retreat of sea ice could cause a commensurate increase in weather extremes. But now it has become clear.

The retreat of sea ice is causing a non-linear rise in Arctic temperature, so that it is now rising at about 1 degree per decade, which is about 6x faster than global warming, reckoned to be rising at between 0.16 and 0.17 degree per decade. The temperature gradient between the tropics and the Arctic has reduced significantly over the past decade, as a result of this so-called ‘Arctic amplification of global warming’.

It now appears that the polar jet stream behaviour is critically dependent on this gradient. As the gradient diminishes, the jet stream meanders more, with greater amplitude of the Rossby waves and therefore with peaks further north and troughs further south. This effect alone produces weather extremes - hot weather further north than normal and cold weather further south than normal.

But as well as meandering more, the jet stream is also tending to get stuck in so-called 'blocking patterns', where, instead of moving gradually eastwards, the jet stream wave peak or wave trough stays in much the same place for months. This blocking may be due to stationary highs over land mass and lows over ocean, with the jet stream weaving round them. Here we may be a witnessing of a dynamic interaction between the effects of Arctic amplification and global warming.

Note that there was a similar dynamic interaction in the case of Sandy. Ocean surface warmed by global warming lent strength to the hurricane and provided a northerly storm track up the coast; and then a sharp left turn over New York was prompted by meeting a jet stream blocking pattern.

As a climate scientist, one might have expected a reduced gradient between tropics and pole to have some effect on weather systems, because there is less energy to drive them. The normal pattern comprises 3 bands of weather systems around the planet for each hemisphere, with each band having 'cells' of circulating air. The air rises at the tropics, falls at the next boundary, rises at the next, and falls at the pole. There has to be an odd number of bands, so that there is air rising at the equator and falling at the poles. The jet streams are at the boundary between the bands.

As the temperature gradient between tropics and pole reduces, one would expect the weather systems to spread in a chaotic manner, meandering more wildly. This is exactly what has been observed.

The sticking of the jet stream must be associated with non-uniformities of surface topology and heat distribution. Thus highs and/or lows are getting stuck over some feature or other, while the jet stream meanders around them.

Thus there is a reasonable explanation for how we are getting weather extremes, simply as a result of a reduced temperature gradient between Arctic and tropics. Another argument that has been given, most notably by Professor Hansen, is that the extreme weather events are simply a result of global warming - i.e. a general rise in temperature over the whole surface of the planet. Global warming can indeed explain a gradual increase in the average intensity of storms (whose energy is derived from sea surface warming) and in the peaks of temperature for heat waves. But global warming does not explain the observed meandering of the jet stream and associated weather extremes, both hot/dry and cold/wet, whereas the warming of the Arctic can explain these observations. Furthermore the non-linear warming of the Arctic can explain the non-linear increase of extreme events.

Since this hypothesis seems reasonable, it is fitting that the precautionary principle should be applied when it comes to trends. The forecasting of extreme events must take into account the trend towards more extreme events as the Arctic warms. And the Arctic is liable to be warm about twice as fast in 2015 as it in 2012, because of sea ice retreat.

This all adds up to a picture of abrupt climate change in the Arctic, now spreading to the Northern Hemisphere and soon to afflict the whole planet. These changes must be halted and then reversed. Meanwhile the effect on food security must be handled before the whole situation gets much worse.

Handling the food crisis

What should a country do, when faced by such a grave food crisis? The immediate response may be to become introspective and try and insulate the country from what is happening in the rest of the world. For a country like the UK, this is difficult, because of importing 40% of food and much of its energy requirements, such as natural gas from Kuwait. For the US, self-sufficiency has been a goal for energy, but there is a food problem from weather extremes, which particularly seem to affect the country.

For countries which have been net exporters of basic foodstuffs, the response may be to halt exports, as Russia did for wheat recently to protect its citizens but pushing up the food price index in the process. If this type of response is widespread, then a vicious cycle of food price increase and protectionism could develop, with a stifling of world trade and an increase in strife between countries.

But what people must not do is to ignore the non-linear trends and blame the weather extremes either on random fluctuations or on essentially linear effects such as global warming. The danger is that governments will do nothing at all to address the underlying cause of the linearity, which lies in the vicious cycle of Arctic warming and sea ice retreat.

We believe that a sensible strategy is two-fold: to deal with the symptoms of the disease and the cause of the disease.

The most conspicuous symptoms are floods, droughts, food price increase, security of food supply and food shortages. Less conspicuous are the effects of food price increase on global unrest and the spread of disease among humans, animals and plants. Water shortages may also be a growing issue in many countries. The changing frequency, severity, path and predictability of tropical storms (hurricanes, typhoons, monsoons, etc) will be a major issue for many countries, especially those with large coastal conurbations and those who depend on regular monsoons. Coastal regions and cities that have hitherto been immune to such storms may suffer great damage, as happened with Sandy to New York and could happen to Dubai.

Countries which rely heavily on one crop for income are liable to be heavily hit by weather changes.

By studying trends, one can estimate how quickly the situation is likely to deteriorate. One can see an exponential rise in extreme weather events, and the food price index is liable to follow this trend because of reduced agricultural productivity.

The price of food is dependent on a number of factors besides agricultural productivity, and these are under human control.

The policy of “food for fuel” has undoubtedly driven up the price of food, so this policy needs to be changed. Biofuel can still be part of policy, but must come from sustainable sources and without competing with food. For example biofuel from the biochar process can actually benefit food production, because the residue from heating biomass and producing the biofuel is a form of charcoal that can be used for improving soils, water retention, and crop yields.

An important factor in the price of food is the price of oil, because of use of oil in agriculture, not only for farm machinery and food transport but also for artificial fertiliser. Unfortunately much oil comes from countries where much of the population is on the bread line, so the social unrest from food price increase can shut down access to the oil which further pushes up the cost of food in a vicious cycle.

Speculation on the price of oil can be a major factor in producing spikes in the food price index, so this needs to be discouraged in some way. Similarly speculation on food commodities needs to be discouraged.

Perhaps the most important factor is management of food stocks, seed stocks, planting practice (use of monoculture, GM crops, etc.), timing of planting and irrigation. The timing becomes increasingly problematic as global weirding increases and weather becomes more unpredictable. There needs to be advice to farmers on how to cope – e.g. by judicious diversification and reduced reliance on single crop planting.

Cooling the Arctic

Dealing with the underlying cause of the climate extremes turns out to be even more important than dealing with the consequences on food security, because the underlying cause is a process which is gaining momentum and could become unstoppable in 2013.

In effect, we are approaching a point of no return, after which it will be impossible to rescue the situation.

The speed of action is required because of the speed of sea ice retreat. All indications are that there will be a major collapse of sea ice next year, with a new record minimum. And September 2015 is likely to be virtually sea ice free.

This is the inescapable evidence from the PIOMAS sea ice volume data.

Even if there were no danger from passing a point of no return, rapid action would be worthwhile because of the financial and human cost of the abrupt climate change.

The only chance of halting this abrupt climate change in its tracks is to cool the Arctic, and prevent Arctic amplification disrupting the jet stream more than it is at the moment. Delay to such action would cost around a trillion dollars per year and put a billion people into starvation.

Figure 3 ~ The trend analysis of PIOMAS data

The target should be to prevent a new record low of sea ice extent next year (2013). This involves providing sufficient cooling power into the Arctic to offset the warming which has built up as the sea ice has retreated. This warming is due to the “albedo flip effect” and is estimated as being up to 0.4 petawatts averaged over the year. This warming has to be countered by an equal cooling power, if the target is to be met.

This is a colossal engineering and logistics challenge. A war effort on developing, testing and deploying geoengineering techniques would be justified to meet the target.

Cloud effects that could be exploited to cool the Arctic

Clouds have effects in opposite directions: reflecting sunshine back into space and reflecting thermal radiation back to Earth. The former cools, the latter heats. Geoengineering tries to enhance the former and/or diminish the latter, to alter the balance towards cooling. The balance is critically dependent on the droplet size: there is an optimum size for reflecting sunlight, as for the particles to make white paint. Particles much larger than this will reflect thermal radiation strongly.

When the sun is high in the sky, the balance is towards cooling by reflection of sunlight; but when the sun is low in the sky, the balance is towards heating by reflection of thermal radiation. Thus techniques for cloud brightening tend not to work well in winter at high latitudes.

Clouds also can produce snow which will generally increase albedo to around 0.85 where it falls; whereas rain will generally reduce albedo by melting any snow and by forming puddles or pools on land or ice surfaces. However, rain or snow falling through a dusty atmosphere can darken the surface on which it falls. Hence the black carbon from tundra fires may have some sunshine reflecting effect while in the atmosphere, but then reduce albedo when it’s washed out.

There are a number of different things to do with clouds: create them (typically as a haze), brighten them, extend their life, reduce them by precipitation (rain or snow), or reduce them by evaporation.

Perhaps the simplest form of geoengineering is to create a haze. Particles or fine droplets of haze in the troposphere tend to get washed out of the air within days or weeks, whereas if they are in the stratosphere they can last for months or even a few years, depending on their initial altitude and latitude. The stratosphere Brewer-Dobson meridional circulation has air slowly moving in an arc from lower latitudes to higher latitudes, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewer-Dobson_circulation

By judicial choice of quantity, altitude and latitude for injection of aerosols, one can obtain a much longer cooling effect in the stratosphere than in the troposphere. Thus one needs much less aerosol in the stratosphere to produce the equivalent effect in the troposphere. Note that the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 produced a global cooling of 0.5 degrees C over a period of two years.

Providing cloud condensation nuclei (CNN) of the right size can brighten clouds without significantly affecting their lifetime. Sulphate aerosol in the troposphere produce both a reflective haze and CNN. These combined effects from aerosol ‘pollution’ have masked global warming by as much as 75%. If all coal-fired power stations were shut down, there would be a significant decrease in aerosol cooling and an upward leap in the rate of global warming.

Three preferred cooling techniques

A combination of three cooling techniques is proposed, to give flexibility in deployment and maximise the chances of success:

stratospheric aerosols to reflect sunlight;

cloud brightening to reflect more sunlight;

cloud removal to allow thermal radiation into space.

The first technique mimics the action of large volcanoes such as Mt Pinatubo which erupted in 1991 and had a cooling effect of 0.5 degrees C over 2 years due to the sulphate aerosols it produced in the stratosphere. However larger particles in the aerosol are liable to reflect thermal radiation from the planet surface, hence having a warming effect. To avoid this, there is an advantage in using TiO2 particles, as used in white paint. These can be engineered to a constant size, and coated to produce required properties, such as not sticking to one another. Large quantities could be dispersed at high latitudes in the lower stratosphere either using stratotankers or balloons, to have an effect lasting a few months during spring, summer and early autumn. Due to circulating winds, the aerosol will spread around the latitude where it has been injected.

Cloud brightening is a technique whereby a very fine salt spray is produced from special spray nozzles mounted on a ship, and gets wafted up to clouds where it increases their reflective power. Whereas stratospheric particles can provide blanket cooling at particular latitudes, the brightening technique can be used to cool particular locations, using sophisticated modelling to decide when and where is best to do the spraying.

The third cooling techniques involves removing certain high clouds during the months of little or no sunshine when they are having a net blanketing effect – reflecting heat back to the ground.

Additional techniques should be considered for more local cooling, especially by increasing surface albedo; for example one could increase snowfall over land or brighten water by injection of tiny bubbles. Another technique is to break up the sea ice in autumn and winter, which has the effect of thickening the ice and producing what looks like multi-year ice. A very promising approach is to reduce currents carrying water into the Arctic Ocean, in particular the partial damming of the Bering Strait.

Note that all the above techniques are expected to enhance the Arctic ecosystem, which is in danger of sharp decline as a result of sea ice collapse.

Local measures to save the sea ice

There are a number of physical ways to reduce loss of sea ice:

corral the ice when it is liable to break up and float into warmer waters

reduce wave action at the edges

replace or cool warmer surface water using colder water from beneath

thicken the ice by shoving ice on the water onto other ice

thicken the ice by adding water on top to freeze

thicken the ice by adding snow (which may also brighten it)

add a layer of white granules or reflecting sheet.

The last of these can also be used for retaining snow. It could be used on the Greenland Ice Sheet to preserve snow and ice. (AMEG founder member, Professor Peter Wadhams, has co-authored a paper on the subject, to be presented at AGU. He has also done work on how tabular icebergs break off at the edges.)

Pulling out all the stops, whatever

There is one thing that we do know can produce an appropriate amount of cooling power: the sulphate aerosol in the troposphere, as emitted from coal-fired power stations and from ship bunker fuel. This aerosol has offset CO2 warming by around 75% in the past century. There should be a temporary suspension of initiatives and regulations to suppress these emissions, while they are having a significant cooling effect in the Northern Hemisphere, unless human health is at risk.

Much attention should be given to short-lived climate forcing agents, such as methane. There should be a moratorium on drilling in the Arctic, as proposed by the UK Environment Audit Committee in their report “Protecting the Arctic”, September 2012.

Measures to reduce black carbon should be taken. There should be teams of fire-fighters set up to take prompt action on tundra fires, which produce black carbon, methane and carbon monoxide – all undesirable.

More direct means to deal with weather anomalies

Cloud brightening and wave pump technology can be used to cool the surface of the sea in specific areas. This technology holds promise to reduce the power of hurricanes and other storms, but might also be used to produce precipitation where needed or dampen oscillations of the planet’s climate system, e.g. ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation).

More direct means to deal with methane emissions

AMEG realises that there is a problem of growing methane emissions from the high latitude wetlands and from permafrost which is thawing, both on land and under the sea bed. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, so we have been investigating how to suppress methane and methane production. We have some valuable ideas, based on use of diatoms in water treatment. The water treatment means that fish can thrive where previously the water was brackish. Thus, not only is methane suppressed, but fish farming becomes possible on a very large scale at very low cost. Increasing food production is going to become paramount in a warming world with a growing population.Modelling and monitoring

Essential to all geoengineering deployment is good modelling of the climate system. Unfortunately, none of the global climate models deal with the speed of events in the Arctic. It is essential to have a good understanding of the processes at work. Part of the war effort to meet the geoengineering target must be devoted to improving the models.

Similarly there must be adequate monitoring facilities to ascertain the effects of geoengineering, and prevent inadvertent negative impacts. Some satellites which could supply appropriate monitoring are nearing the end of life or coming out of service, so must be replaced as quickly as possible.

Not an end to the story

Cooling the Arctic is not the only step that is required to save civilisation from fatal consequences of mankind’s interference with the Earth System, but it is prerequisite. Assuming the sea ice is restored, global temperatures could still rise too high, oceans acidify too much or rainforests dry out and burn down. AMEG supports efforts to deal with such matters.

But cooling the Arctic is the first emergency response strategy.

ACTION PLAN

This is in two parts: firstly interventions for adjustment/restoration/repair of critical Earth System components, especially in the Arctic; and secondly the food crisis, especially the politics of dealing with the situation such to avoid vicious cycles that could jeopardise stability of food production or lead to panic among peoples.

Something akin to a war room needs to be set up, bring experts from all the relevant fields, in order to brainstorm on the problems and possible ways forward.Interventions in the Earth System

These interventions can be viewed as adjustments, restoration and repair of critical Earth System components. Examples include cooling the Arctic, restoring the sea ice and returning polar jet stream behaviour to a more acceptable mode.

For each intervention there may need to be modelling to predict effects and effectiveness and to anticipate problems arising. Correspondingly there needs to be observations, monitoring and measuring of results. The observation of process and the measurement data obtained should be fed back into the models to improve them.

As for appropriate interventions, there are a number of things to do immediately in parallel:

Consider practices and regulations that are having, or risk having, a heating effect on the Arctic. A postponement of drilling in the Arctic would be sensible, because of inevitable escape of methane but also because of the risk of blowout with or without oil spill.

Try to maintain or even enhance the current cooling effect from currently emitted sulphate aerosols in the troposphere at mid to high northern latitudes. For example the regulation to ban bunker fuel for ships should be relaxed while encouraging continued use of bunker fuel where the resulting aerosol emissions might be beneficial. Reduction of sulphate aerosol ‘pollution’ will be unpopular with many environment groups, but the priority to cool the Arctic has to be established.

Establish the positive and negative net forcing from contrails, and encourage flight paths of commercial airplanes to reduce positive or increase negative net forcing. The ban on polar flights, lifted recently, should be reintroduced.

Reduce black carbon into Arctic. Make for preparedness to fight tundra fires in Arctic and sub-Arctic.

Find ways to remove black carbon from coal fired power stations, while allowing or compensating for the cooling effect that their aerosol emissions would be producing without the scrubbing out of sulphur compounds.

Geoengineering actions for enhancing the reflection of sunlight back into space and for increasing the thermal energy emitted into space.

Prepare the supply and logistics for spraying aerosol precursor in large quantities, preferably into the lower stratosphere, for deployment by next March or April (not sooner because the risk of ozone depletion). Of course, possible negative impacts have to be considered before large scale deployment, but it is worth being fully prepared for such deployment on the assumption that this technique can be made to work effectively.

Develop and test the deployment of suitably reflective particles, of such materials as TiO2, as alternative or supplement to sulphate aerosol. Prepare for large scale deployment.

Finance the development of, and deployment capability for, marine cloud brightening, with a view to deployment on a large scale in spring 2013 - assuming that is the earliest conceivable time. The main technical problem seems to be with the jets, so experts from major companies in the ink-jet technology field need to be brought in. Boats and land installations need to be kitted out.

Finance the development and deployment capability for cirrus cloud removal, since this is a promising technique. Suitable chemicals need to be identified/confirmed, with stock-piling of these cloud seeding chemicals. Aircraft need to be kitted out to spray these chemicals.

Finance brainstorming sessions for geoengineering, with top scientists and engineers, such as to suggest further measures, improvements to above techniques and the development of other intervention ideas.

Finance the research and trials of all promising techniques for helping to cool the Arctic, including the three geoengineering techniques above. Update Earth System models to deal with the actualities of sea ice retreat, such that the effects of different techniques can be modelled and optimum joint deployment strategies established.

Measures to reduce more specific risks from Arctic warming:

Finance the research and trials of promising techniques for dealing with methane, especially the reduction of methane from wetlands draining into the Arctic. Use of diatoms to promote methanotrophs (and healthy conditions for fish) is one such technique.

Finance the research and trials of promising techniques for dealing with surface melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) and for reducing the speed of ice mass discharge. The latter is accelerated by warm water at the sea termination of glaciers; therefore consideration should be given to techniques to cool this water.

Consider techniques for reducing Arctic storms and their strength. Techniques should be developed for reducing the frequency and severity of tropical storms, such as to minimise damage, especially to agriculture and low-lying conurbations.

Consider techniques for un-sticking of blocked weather patterns.

Consider techniques for improving surface albedo of sea, lakes, snow and ice by brightening water with bubbles, covering snow and ice with white granules or sheets to prolong albedo, draining pools on ice, forming ice on pools, depositing snow on ice (as fresh snow has a higher albedo) and on land, discouraging growth of plants with low albedo, etc.

Note that a new idea for improving surface albedo has been suggested in a paper to the AGU 2012, supported by AMEG founder member, Peter Wadhams.. His research on iceberg calving has led to ideas for reducing discharge of ice from the GIS.

A word of warning about finance of research, development and field trials: it is important that the results of such activities are independent, unbiased and free from financial interest. Food security actions

Immediate actions to be initiated:

Overall there is an immediate requirement for all major governments to establish an emergency ‘watchdog’ committee for internal and world food security issues. This committee should have direct access to the leadership of individual nations and include their UN Ambassador. The associated costs, in terms of humanitarian impacts alone, should warrant this move. When the assessed cost of the potentially associated national economic factors are weighed, there should be little disagreement regarding the necessity for establishing this ‘watchdog’ committee.

The US Renewable Fuels Standard (“RFS”), a provision of the US Energy Policy Act of 2005, should be evaluated for a temporary stay. Depending entirely on the US corn harvest, this could transfer between 4 to 5 billion bushels back to the food market. That would reduce upward price pressure in the cereals markets and further assist by suppressing speculation in that area of food commodities.

The European Renewable Energy Directive 2009/28/EC should similarly be reviewed and measures put in place to temporarily divert all relevant crops from the fuel to the food market.

In both cases outlined in points 3 & 4 the emphasis should be on ‘temporary emergency measures’ and should only be applicable to crops that can be diverted to the food chain.

A general directive should be agreed between all nations at the UN to prohibit the sale of OTC derivatives, in any nation, by any ‘seller’, that have any content relative to food commodities. This action will assist in dissuading institutional investors speculating in food commodities.

If the crisis deepens point 4 should be further reinforced by prohibiting futures contracts in food commodities being sold to any entity who will not take actual delivery of the contracted goods. Great care will be necessary with this proposal as it is known that hedge funds, and investment banks, have established warehousing to control certain commodity pricing. Typical examples are the attempted 2010 cornering of the world cocoa market by a UK hedge fund and the current Goldman Sachs control of the US aluminium market.

An alternative international seed bank must be created to provide seeds for subsistence farmers; ones that are devoid of the ‘terminator’ gene. In periods of high crop failure the inability to harvest seeds for the coming year has a crippling impact on subsistence farmers. Note that it is estimated 160,000 Indian farmers alone have committed suicide since 1967 due in part to this situation.

Following the launch of AMEG’s ‘Strategic Plan’ the above actions will be communicated to all world leaders and relevant parties in the form of an ‘Essential Action Plan’ to match the pending circumstances of the change in the world’s weather patterns.

For further details, see the website of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group at AMEG.me or contact AMEG Chair John Nissen at: johnnissen2003@gmail.com

Monday, November 26, 2012

by John Nissen, Chair of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG)The problem

As the sea ice retreats, exposed water absorbs more sunshine, heating the water and causing further melt of the sea ice in a vicious cycle. This appears to be the dominant positive feedback loop in the Arctic, although snow retreat may contribute nearly as much to the warming of the Arctic generally.

This cycle is shown in the purple square in the diagram below, marked "Vicious cycle [1]".

The basic strategy for preventing an exponentially worsening situation is to cool the Arctic sufficiently to halt Arctic warming and prevent a record sea ice minimum in 2013 [click to enlarge image].

The most immediate negative impact of this cycle and the warming of the Arctic atmosphere is a disruption of polar jet stream from its normal behaviour, such that there are more frequent and more severe weather extremes experienced in the Northern Hemisphere. This impact has grown so conspicuously over the past few years that we can honestly say that we are now experiencing abrupt climate change. The result of this climate change is widespread crop failure and an ever deepening food crisis.

However there are longer term impacts and threats, in particular:
(i) Greenland Ice Sheet destabilisation,
(ii) accelerated methane discharge,
(iii) loss of biodiversity and habitat, and
(iv) making it more difficult to keep to global warming targets.

As the snow and sea ice retreat from their levels in the 70s, more solar energy is absorbed. Taking the 70s as the baseline (zero forcing), this year's retreat produced as much as 0.4 petawatts of climate forcing averaged over the year. Much of this heat energy is retained in the Arctic, causing ice to melt and sea and land temperatures to rise. As temperatures rise, there will be slightly more thermal radiation into space, dissipating some of this energy. However most of this heat energy will slowly dissipate across the planet - and 0.4 petawatts is equivalent to half the forcing producing by anthropogenic CO2 emissions (1.6 watts per square metre). Peter Wadhams has estimated that the sea ice retreat by itself is equivalent to the forcing from 20 years of CO2 emissions, thus making it much more difficult for the global temperature to be kept below the so-called safe limit of 2 degrees warming.

However these long term effects are somewhat academic, if the immediate impact is to raise food prices far above a safe level.

It is much easier to think about and quantify the longer term impacts of Arctic warming than the more immediate impacts. This is a trap for the unwary. Therefore AMEG is trying to bring the world's attention to the immediate impacts, as they turn out to be colossal even this year, and are likely to be worse in 2013 and even worse than that in 2014.

It is clear that abrupt climate change has started, but not in the way we had been told to expect. Yes, there would be more climate extremes as the planet heated, but we were expecting a linear or near linear behaviour of the climate system, with gradual temperature change over the century. Instead we have striking non-linearity, with exponential growth in frequency and severity of climate extremes. This non-linearity is almost certain to have arisen from the exponential decline in sea ice, as shown in the PIOMAS sea ice volume trend. The trend is for September ice to fall to zero by 2015. Thus we can expect one month without sea ice in 2015, with the possibility for this event in 2014 or even in 2013.

Apart from volcanic eruptions and earthquakes with their step changes of state, the behaviour of the sea ice is possibly the most non-linear part of the Earth System because the melting is a threshold process. Until recently it was not well understood how the retreat of sea ice could cause a commensurate increase in weather extremes. But now it has become clear.

The retreat of sea ice is causing a non-linear rise in Arctic temperature, so that it is now rising at about 1 degree per decade, which is about 6x faster than global warming, reckoned to be rising at between 0.16 and 0.17 degree per decade. The temperature gradient between the tropics and the Arctic has reduced significantly over the past decade.

It now appears that the polar jet stream behaviour is critically dependent on this gradient. As the gradient diminishes, the jet stream meanders more, with a bigger amplitude of the Rossby waves, with peaks further north and troughs further south. This effect alone produces weather extremes - hot weather further north than normal and cold weather further south than normal. But as well as meandering more, the jet stream is also tending to get stuck in so-called 'blocking patterns', where, instead of moving gradually eastwards, the jet stream wave peak or wave trough stays in much the same place for months.

As a climate scientist, one might have expected a reduced gradient between tropics and pole to have some effect on weather systems, because there is less energy to drive them. The normal pattern comprises 3 bands of weather systems around the planet for each hemisphere, with each band having 'cells' of circulating air. The air rises at the tropics, falls at the next boundary, rises at the next, and falls at the pole. There has to be an odd number of bands, so that there is air rising at the equator and falling at the poles. The jet streams are at the boundary between the bands.

Such a pattern is visible on Jupiter but with many more bands. The number of bands is dependent on the temperature difference between equator and poles. When the temperature gradient reduces, one would expect the number of bands to reduce. For the Earth System it would have to reduce from 3 bands to 1 band! Thus as the gradient reduces the weather systems spread in a chaotic manner, meandering more wildly. This is exactly what has been observed.

The sticking of the jet stream must be associated with non-uniformities of surface topology and heat distribution. Thus highs and/or lows are getting stuck over some feature or other, while the jet stream meanders around them.

Thus there is a reasonable explanation for how we are getting weather extremes, simply as a result of a reduced temperature gradient between Arctic and tropics. Another argument that has been given, most notably by Professor Hansen, is that the extreme weather events are simply a result of global warming - i.e. a general rise in temperature over the whole surface of the planet. Global warming can indeed explain a gradual increase in the average intensity of storms (whose energy is derived from sea surface warming) and in the peaks of temperature for heat waves. But global warming does not explain the observed meandering of the jet stream and associated weather extremes, both hot/dry and cold/wet. On the other hand the warming of the Arctic can explain the increased meandering of the jet stream and the non-linear increase of extreme events.

Since this hypothesis seems reasonable, it is fitting that the precautionary principle should be applied when it comes to trends. The forecasting of extreme events must take into account the trend towards more extreme events as the Arctic warms. And the Arctic is going to be warming about twice as fast in 2015 as it is this year, because of sea ice retreat.

Furthermore the change from a basic 3 bands to 1 band is likely to be a threshold process, i.e. highly non-linear.

This all adds up to a picture of abrupt climate change, which is happening now.

We must be prepared to deal with the direct impact on food prices, in order to try and avoid so much social rest that it leads to international conflict.

But we must also attack the underlying cause of the climate extremes, and for this we have no option but to cool the Arctic with the necessary cooling power firstly to halt Arctic warming and the sea ice retreat "as soon as possible", and secondly to gradually bring the temperature and sea ice back to the state they were in decades ago - the state required to return the planet's climate and temperature to the old norm, under which civilisation flourished for thousands of years.

In view of the rapid deterioration in the food situation, "as soon as possible" has to be for next year - with the aim of preventing a worse retreat of sea ice in the summer. The financial cost of a year's deterioration runs into hundreds of $billions, but we also have a cost in human misery measured in perhaps a billion people moving into starvation or near starvation. On top of that, we have the possibility that if we don't act quickly, it may be too late - i.e. we will have passed the point of no return.

Thus our geoengineering to cool the Arctic is worthy of a war effort to obtain large scale deployment in a matter of months.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

The Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG) is an independent climate policy group ( website www.ameg.me ) giving advice to governments concerning the unfolding crisis in the Arctic arising from the precipitous decline in Arctic sea ice. AMEG comprises scientists, engineers, environmentalists, economists and communicators, who have cumulative expertise to judge the situation and recommend appropriate responses. They are particularly concerned with Arctic warming, associated ice losses and possibilities for consequent releases of methane on a large scale which has the potential to send global warming spiralling out of control. The group has become increasingly concerned about the effect of rapid Arctic warming on jet stream behaviour, which is producing increasingly frequent and severe climate extremes in the Northern Hemisphere. These extreme weather events are already causing decreases in global food production and rising grain prices with more declines expected. These trends can be expected to lead at some point to widespread famine.

AMEG is determined to bring the difficult truth to governments, having noted the difficult position of climate scientists who are often harassed if they bring this terrible news to the public. We will also provide frank assessments about all possible measures to deal with the rapidly growing problems.

Growing crisis in the Arctic requires rapid intervention

This year’s record minimum Arctic sea ice extent (some 22% below the 2007 and 2011 minimum extents) strongly suggests that a final collapse in the sea ice is underway and closely following an exponential downward trend in sea ice volume [1]. AMEG has repeatedly warned that this would happen and raised the issue in their submission to the UK Environment Audit Committee (EAC) hearing on "Protecting the Arctic," on Hansard record [2]. The complete collapse of sea ice (where practically none is left (<10%) for at least one day of the year) is now likely by 2016. The extreme danger lies in the repercussions of this sea ice loss, especially those resulting from seabed methane emissions and from altered jet stream behaviour – the latter already being experienced with extremes of drought and floods in many regions of the northern hemisphere. It should be noted that we cannot be certain that we would not start to experience significant problems with agricultural productivity even before we reach this point.

AMEG is confident that the crisis can still be averted successfully provided that immediate action is taken to cool the Arctic. This will inevitably involve a degree of intervention known as geoengineering as we have no other options to achieve the necessary rate and intensity of cooling required to stabilise the sea ice and buy time. AMEG therefore calls for urgent further research into technologies to help cool the Arctic and for tests and preparations to start without delay in order to be ready for rapid deployment of some of the more effective (and safe) techniques that are currently available for regional cooling of the Arctic. We must avert further collapse of sea ice and subsequent climate catastrophe. AMEG warns there is a real risk of further (and theoretically even nearly total) ice collapse by summer 2013.

AMEG stresses that to effectively reduce the threat of catastrophic climate change governments around the world must commit to a comprehensive plan of action and that geoengineering methods to cool the Arctic are now required on at least a temporary basis. AMEG repeats that it is also imperative for governments to act to immediately start reducing emissions dramatically.

Repeated warnings about sea ice collapse by AMEG sea-ice expert Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University have not been reflected in most discussions of the topic because most models have projected a much less rapid retreat as has been apparent through the World Climate Research Programme Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. The Phase 3 models (CMIP3) used for the IPCC AR4 drastically under-projected losses of ice and even the current Phase 5 (CMIP5) ones (which will be fundamental to the upcoming IPCC AR5) have not been able to replicate what is unfolding right now. It is therefore extremely unwise to rely upon such model predictions in light of empirical observations demonstrating that the rate of change is far worse than such models predict.

However, the collapse was predictable simply from observed trends of sea ice volume: the Arctic has been warming and sea ice has retreated, leaving more open water in summer and further thinning of the ice year on year. In summer, the minimum extent and thickness (and hence volume) of the sea ice is getting ever smaller. Exponential volume trends indicate zero ice by September 2016 or earlier, by which time the extent must necessarily also have collapsed. It would most likely be too late by this time to attempt intervention to cool the system due to the significantly greater amounts of heat absorbed by open water than by reflective ice.

With arctic methane emissions the focus of the climate community had mostly been on land-based permafrost emissions as it was assumed that sea-based emissions could not be activated much until far greater amounts of warming had time to penetrate the deeper ocean. However AMEG has been advised by Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov – Russian scientists who are the principal researchers around the East Siberian Arctic Shelf – that escalating emissions from the seabed there pose a threat of abrupt global climate change as the protective and insulating cover of the sea ice disappears [3]. There is so much methane stored under the seabed in this region that less than a one percent release of the potent greenhouse gas in that region alone, e.g. as a result of a large earthquake or rapid seabed heating (as caused by warmer river run off from warming land) could cause a substantial spike in the rate of global warming, considerably altering the path of global climate for the worse.

There are ominous signs of an escalation of seabed emissions with enormous plumes of methane bubbles rising from the shallow bed of the Laptev Sea reaching the surface. There have been recordings of extremely high rates of ebullition via sonar, recordings of extremely elevated atmospheric levels ( >300% background levels) from a ship traversing the Siberian coast and increasingly high atmospheric in situ readings at the Barrow monitoring station. Both satellite and dedicated aircraft measurements have indicated growing atmospheric methane levels over much of the Arctic Ocean.

AMEG has recently warned of increased climate extremes and a global food crisis that could deepen as the Arctic warms. This year’s severe drought in the US is not an isolated event; much of the world has been afflicted by extreme weather in one form or another, with floods and droughts impacting agriculture. Such extremes have been on the increase. Recent research by scientists such as Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University [4], shows convincing evidence that this increase is partly due to dramatic warming of the Arctic and changing polar jet stream behaviour. Food prices have already been persistently high for several years despite adverse economic circumstances, and adverse weather conditions is an identified factor behind this.

Droughts and floods have been gradually increasing in intensity for a number of years as predicted by the IPCC AR4 report (2007) on climate change. However the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, weakening and at times slowing the jet stream, increasing the frequency and duration of warm/dry spells and cool/wet spells, and this is making matters worse (and faster) than predicted. This year we have seen widespread crop failures and a rise in food prices, with a Global Hunger Alert by the World Bank [5]. Unless emergency measures are immediately taken to cool the Arctic and restore the sea ice one can expect an ever-worsening food crisis in years to come, with the prospect of famine on a vast scale and associated conflict and social breakdown.

There are other serious longer term repercussions of sea ice disappearance and Arctic warming such as accelerated disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which would cause very serious sea level rise. AMEG has chosen to focus on methane escalation and disruption of agriculture as they can be seen to be occurring already with potentially apocalyptic results if Arctic warming continues unabated.

AMEG’s conclusion is that there is now a planetary emergency. Only by grasping the nettle and intervening with great determination, as in a war effort, is there a chance of remedying the situation before it is too late. International collaboration to fight this common "enemy" of Arctic meltdown must bring all nations together, in the cause of our very survival.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

What is happening in the Arctic is what Peter Wadhams, myself and others in AMEG have been dreading – that our deductions from the physics of the Arctic sea ice situation have come true. We also understand some of the dreadful repercussions from a sea ice collapse, which nobody has wanted to believe. But it is also like a cloud lifted, because now we can tell the world that we’ve been right all along. The sea ice extent was bound to start collapsing within the next year or two, because the thickness was decreasing steadily. Now it’s happened. Now people will have to face up to the repercussions. Now people can realise that our only choice, if we want to avoid decent into a hellish nightmare, is to geo-engineer like mad – use all the measures and techniques at our disposal that we can deploy immediately or at least before next summer’s melt, in the hope of trying to prevent further collapse.

We have left action awfully late. The first sea ice collapse in 2007 should have prepared us for further collapse in the following years. The physics is elementary. It was not put in the climate models, which have continued to forecast that the sea ice would last for decades. The Hadley Centre models were predicting end century demise. This is what is cemented into IPCC AR4 on which all climate negotiations are based. These models have now proved rubbish. Yet it was the chief scientist at the Met Office, Prof Julia Slingo, ultimately responsible for the Hadley models, who rubbished the PIOMAS data on sea ice volume, saying that her models would prove Wadhams and AMEG wrong. This is on public record, because she gave this as evidence to the Environment Audit Committee hearing on “Protecting the Arctic”.

But far more serious than the denial of physics and the laws of nature was the denial of the precautionary principle – if our concerns about sea ice loss and repercussions (particularly a methane excursion) had even a small probability of proving correct, it would have been sensible to prepare for the worst by developing the geoengineering techniques that could provide enough cooling power to avoid a sea ice collapse. The cost would have been minimal in relation to the cost of trying to deal with repercussions – which some of us fear could be the end of civilisation. But nothing happened, so no geoengineering has been prepared.

AMEG has had a predicament – a dilemma. If we say how bad the situation really is, people will brand us as doom-mongers and not want to listen. If we don’t, then nobody will learn the truth.

But now it’s different. Our predictions on the sea ice have proved correct. We have the credibility. Our timescales are appropriate. (Only the other day a student wrote an article for the Ecologist saying that, after consulting experts at UEA, he was convinced that AMEG had got its timescales wrong.)

The most visible repercussions of sea ice decline and rapid Arctic warming (it’s warming five or six times the global average by my reckoning, and that ratio will leap up as the sea ice disappears) are the escalating emissions of methane, now seen to be bubbling in vast plumes from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf seabed, and the global weirding, seen to be affecting farmers all over the world as the Arctic warms, polar jet stream meanders more, sticking in places to cause weather extremes, long periods of both hot dry weather and cool wet weather. These two repercussions have been AMEG’s focus of late, see press release.

Never in the history of the human race has there been so much danger to confront. We have the brains – we should have the intelligence – to deal with it. Psychologically we have real problems, continuing to believe that we are immortal and “it can’t happen to us”. It is.

The record low Arctic sea ice extent, reached in the past few days, shows that a collapse
in the sea ice is underway, and the minimum to be reached in a few weeks, could be
as much as a million square kilometres below the September 2007 and 2011 minima
(which were almost the same). AMEG has repeatedly warned that this could happen,
raising the issue in their submission to the UK Environment Audit Committee (EAC)
hearing on “Protecting the Arctic”, on Hansard record. The complete collapse of sea ice,
till practically none is left for at least one day of the year, is now likely by 2015. The
extreme danger lies in the repercussions of the sea ice loss, especially those resulting
from seabed methane emissions and from altered jet stream behaviour – the latter already
being experienced with extremes of drought and floods in different parts of the northern
hemisphere. However AMEG is confident that a crisis can be averted if immediate
action is taken to cool the Arctic, but this will inevitably involve a degree of intervention
known as geoengineering because of the large cooling power required. Preparations
need to start straightaway for deployment of the best candidate techniques, with a view to
rapid deployment, hopefully in time to head off a worse collapse of sea ice next summer.

The repeated warnings about the sea ice by AMEG sea ice experts (including Professor
Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University) have been ignored or scorned as doom-
mongering by climate scientists, who claim that the sea ice will last for decades. So the
current collapse may come as a nasty surprise to many people. However the collapse
could have been expected from observed trends, particularly of sea ice volume. The
Arctic has been warming, sea ice has retreated leaving open water in summer, and the
relentless Arctic summer sun has warmed the water to produce further thinning of the
ice. Each year, come the minimum ice extent at the end of summer, the thickness and
volume of the ice has been less. The trend reaches zero volume before September 2015,
by which time the extent must obviously have collapsed.

The AMEG warning on methane emissions has also been ignored or scorned by climate
scientists, who claim that the emissions will be too slow to have an appreciable global
warming effect this century. However AMEG has been advised by Russian scientists,
Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov, that escalating emissions from the East Siberian
Arctic Shelf seabed pose a threat of abrupt climate change, as the protective and
insulating cover of the sea ice disappears. There is so much methane stored under the
seabed that only one percent release of this potent greenhouse gas, e.g. as a result of a
large earthquake or rapid seabed heating, could cause intolerable global warming.

AMEG has recently warned of increased climate extremes and a global food crisis that
will deepen as the Arctic warms. This year’s severe drought in the US is not an isolated
event; much of the world has been afflicted by extreme weather in one form or another,
with floods and droughts impacting agriculture. Such extremes have been on the increase.
Recent research by scientists, such as Dr Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, shows
convincing evidence that this increase is related to dramatic warming of the Arctic and
changing polar jet stream behaviour.

Droughts and floods have been gradually increasing in intensity for a great many years,
as the IPCC AR4 report (2007) predicted would occur with global warming. However
the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet. This has weakened the jet stream,
increasing the frequency and duration of warm/dry spells and cool/wet spells, and thereby
making matters much worse. This year we have seen widespread crop failures and a rise
in food prices*. Unless emergency measures are immediately taken to cool the Arctic and
restore the sea ice, one can expect an ever worsening food crisis in years to come, with
the prospect of famine on a biblical scale.

There are other serious repercussions of sea ice disappearance and Arctic warming, such
as a disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet to cause massive sea level rise. But AMEG
has chosen to focus on methane escalation and the food crisis because they can be seen to
be already under way, with apocalyptic results if Arctic warming continues unabated.

AMEG’s conclusion is that we have a planetary emergency as a result of the downward
spiral of sea ice. Only by grasping the nettle and applying geoengineering with great
determination, as in a war effort, do we have a chance of remedying the situation before it
is too late. International collaboration to fight this common “enemy” of Arctic meltdown
must bring all nations together, simply in the cause of survival.

The PIOMAS data for the annual minimum values are the black dots. The trend (in red) is added by Wipneus and points at 2015 as the year when ice volume will reach zero. Note that the red line points at the start of the year 2015. The minimum in September 2014 will be already be close to zero, with perhaps a few hundred cubic km remaining just north of Greenland and Canada.

Above image, again based on PIOMAS data, shows trends added by Wipneus for each month of the year. The black line shows that the average for the month September looks set to reach zero a few months into the year 2015, while the average for October (purple line) will reach zero before the start of the year 2016. Similarly, the average for August (red line) looks set to reach zero before the start of the year 2016.

In conclusion, it looks like there will be no sea ice from August 2015 through to October 2015, while a further three months look set to reach zero in 2017, 2018 and 2019 (respectively July, November and June). Before the start of the year 2020, in other words, there will be zero sea ice for the six months from June through to November.

Actually, events may unfold even more rapidly. As the ice gets thinner, it becomes more prone to break up if there are storms. At the same time, the frequency and intensity of storms looks set to increase as temperatures rise and as there will be more open water in the Arctic Ocean.

Above photo features Peter Wadhams, professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge. Professor Wadhams has been measuring the sea ice in the Arctic for the 40 years, getting underneath the ice with the assistance of submarines, collecting ice thickness data and monitoring the thinning of the ice. This enabled 1970s data and 1980s data to be compared, which showed that the ice had thinned by about 15%. Satellite measurements only started in 1979.

Thinning of the ice is only one of the problems. "The next stage will be a collapse," Professor Wadhams warns, "where the winter growth is more than offset by the summer melt. If we look at the volume of ice that is present in the summer, the trend is so rapidly downwards that this collapse might happen within three or four years."

Apart from melting, strong winds can also influence sea ice extent, as happened in 2007 when much ice was driven across the Arctic Ocean by southerly winds. The fact that this occurred can only lead us to conclude that this could happen again. Natural variability offers no reason to rule out such a collapse, since natural variability works both ways, it could bring about such a collapse either earlier or later than models indicate.

In fact, the thinner the sea ice gets, the more likely an early collapse is to occur. It is accepted science that global warming will increase the intensity of extreme weather events, so more heavy winds and more intense storms can be expected to increasingly break up the remaining ice, both mechanically and by enhancing ocean heat transfer to the under-ice surface.